Radiohead’s “pay what you like” crosses over to real estate

A major music industry conference in Cannes, France, is pulling a page from …

MIDEM, one of the world's biggest music conferences, is taking an offline lesson from Radiohead's online pay-what-you-like experiment. With registration likely down in the wake of the global recession, MIDEM has partnered with a real estate company in Cannes, France to offer 40 apartments in the city at whatever price a MIDEM visitor wants to pay.

The offer doesn't come without strings, but they are surprisingly few. "Everything Cannes," which offers the rentals, requires visitors to pony up for service—linens, cleaning, etc. They also want a credit card to cover damages.

When you leave, you pick what you pay. Visitors are supposed to "have a conversation with your local Guest Support Representative," apparently on the theory that having to look another human in the eye makes it that much harder for the true skinflint to cheap out and offer some absurdly low rate.

This might sound like the perfect chance for a hard sell, a last attempt to shame/bully visitors into paying the listed rate, but Everything Cannes insists that the rate you give will be final. "You will not be asked to enter into conversation about it," says the company. "Your decision is final and will be respected!"

It sounds progressive and interesting and buzzworthy, but the pay-what-you-like, take-it-for-free-if-you-want model hasn't always worked out for the bands that Everything Cannes draws its inspiration from. One recent such experiment that we chronicled on Ars came from UK band Marillion, a band that astute readers may recall I had never heard of, to my shame.

Music of the Ainur, only on Zune

Well, Marillion's back in the news today with an update on its financial situation. The band took a look at all the P2P swapping going on, it saw the PR success Radiohead achieved, and it wanted a piece. So it gave its music away for free through Music Glue, a service that offers free downloads of artists' music, but only after watching a video from the band involved imploring you to support them (then turning over an e-mail address).

Bizarrely, the music is only WMA, which would be great for a band that wants only Zune owners to listen on the go. iPod users can (apparently) piss off.

This was clearly not going to become a marketing success story of the first order, and it wasn't. Even the band's Mark Kelly, the keyboard player, now recognizes that this was a mistake.

Music Glue only works with wma music files and there’s the rub. Within a few days of the wma version becoming available people started posting mp3 versions and since the CDs became available, a few weeks later, FLAC versions also appeared. Today I did a Google search for "Marillion, Happiness is the Road, torrent" and it returned 66,000 results. I followed a few of them and they were all for mp3 or FLAC versions of our album. On one site I saw our entire recorded output from the last 27 years zipped up into one file. This seemed quite popular with the file sharing community as it had been downloaded over 40,000 times. This is depressing.

That does sound depressing, but at least it's not as depressing as the story of Feanor or the depressing tale of Akallabêth. (Note for non-nerds: the band is named after JRR Tolkien's Silmarillion, which is generally pretty depressing, though in that high and lonesome "epic" way.) Not that this is much consolation to a band that "was selling CDs by the million" in the 1980s and now sells CDs "by the thousands."

On the other hand, the band makes about ten times as much money per disc sold, and they pay for (and reap the rewards from) their own touring now. Merchandise sales and ticket sales were up this year, but Kelly freely admits the album itself did not do "as well as we hoped for." What did help was all the free publicity the band got from giving its music away, though as this becomes more popular, it also becomes less buzzworthy.

But the sort of people who attend MIDEM probably aren't the sort who have grown up on P2P—and they probably aren't paying the bill—so Everything Cannes might well end up doing just fine for itself.